Hidden Forces

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with crypto fund manager Ari Paul. Ari is co-founder and CIO of BlockTower Capital, a hedge fund focused exclusively on the cryptocurrency space. Before his move into cryptocurrencies, Ari was a portfolio manager for the University of Chicago’s $8 billion endowment, as well as a derivatives market maker and proprietary trader for Susquehanna International Group (SIG). Ari earned a BA… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address How do you value a cryptocurrency? What are cryptoassets? Can economic and financial models help us build a framework for appraising them? In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Chris Burniske. Chris is a co-founder of Placeholder, a New York venture firm that specializes in cryptoassets. Prior to Placeholder, Chris Burniske pioneered ARK Invest’s Next Generation Internet strategy, leading the firm to become the first public fund manager to… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address Can we learn how to predict the future? If you ask Tim O’Reilly, learning how to predict the future starts with building better maps. In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Tim O’Reilly about mapmaking in the 21st century. Tim has played a seminal role in creating the framework through which an entire generation has come to know and understand the modern Internet. If you have… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Iranian-American writer and political commentator, Hooman Majd about the 2017 protests in Iran. How do we interpret the Iranian protests within the wider political, social, cultural, and financial dimensions of the greater Middle East? Hooman Majd is an NBC News contributor, who has written for publications including the New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair,… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas lays out his vision for a possible future driven by the emergent forces we have been covering in 2017. He reads passages from Ted Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and its Future,” as well as from Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” He plays clips from interviews with Barack Obama, Tim Cook, and Jamie Dimon, as he considers how power, privacy, and control, all… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address Gary Shilling Forecasts the Economic Impact of Tax Cuts and Deregulation on Treasuries and the US Economy. In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with economist Gary Shilling, who famously called the bottom in what has become a 36-year bull market in US Treasuries. He is the author of numerous books including his most recent “The Age of Deleveraging,” a strategic manifesto for managing wealth during an epoch of deflation. He… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address What Is Driving the Earth’s Warming? How Accurate Are the Climate Science Community’s Climate Models? What Are the Predictions for Climate Change in the 21st Century? Weather is the prototypical complex system. Edward Lorenz, one of the pioneers of chaos theory, was a meteorologist. So why is climate change so controversial? In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with NASA’s Chief Climate Scientist and Head of the Goddard Institute for Space… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address I’m so excited to share with you our first video interview on Hidden Forces! This follows my first conversation with Leemon Baird, the inventor of Hashgraph – a consensus algorithm that may do for data processing, computation, and storage, what the entire suite of Internet protocols have done for communication. In short, a technological revolution. In this hour-long conversation, we address some of the latest concerns from the blockchain community, as well as some exciting… Listen >>

How Do We Protect Our Data In A World Of Cyber Attacks And Mass Surveillance? Bruce Schneier And Leemon Baird Discuss The Cyber-Crypto Forces. In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas shares part of his recent conversation with Bruce Schneier, a renowned American cryptographer, computer security professional, and privacy specialist, on the subject of cyber attacks and mass surveillance. Bruce Schneier recently returned from testifying before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on The Internet of Things (IoT) Cybersecurity… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address How Are The Global Macro Forces of Financialization, Debt Deflation, and Structural Demographics Driving The Outlook For The Global Economy? Demetri Kofinas Speaks With Lacy Hunt For The Hour. In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Lacy Hunt, Executive Vice President of Hoisington Investment Management Company. For nearly 14 years, Dr. Lacy Hunt was Chief U.S. Economist for HSBC Group, one of the world’s largest banks. He was… Listen >>

In this special edition of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas spends the first two-thirds of the show breaking down the latest trends in media, society, and culture. He focuses his discussion on the failing mainstream media landscape, its social media echo chamber, and where Hidden Forces intends to go next. In the final fifteen minutes of the program, Demetri brings on David Loewenthal of Aceloew, who has been instrumental in the production of a number of our most recent episodes… Listen >>

Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance, and Genomic Science. What Does Constitutional Law Have To Say? A Conversation with Jeffrey Rosen In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jeffrey Rosen, the nation’s most widely read and influential legal commentator. Their conversation examines the landscape of constitutional law in the 21st century. How do we interpret a more than 200-year-old document in an age of empire, terror, and technological futurism? How do theories of mind apply to the laws… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List First Name Email Address A Theory of Mind and the Neural Basis of Consciousness with Heather Berlin In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Dr. Heather Berlin about the neural basis of consciousness. The two consider a theory of mind based on a materialist perspective on reality. Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental aspects and consciousness,… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address Included at the bottom of this post is video footage from “The Future Is Not Blockchain. It’s Hashgraph,” a panel hosted by Demetri Kofinas on Thursday, October 19, 2017. In it, members of the hashgraph consensus algorithm’s founding team, including the CEO of Swirlds, Mance Harmon, speak with Demetri Kofinas about the future of the Internet. In this blockbuster event, blockchain developers, entrepreneurs, and fans of Hidden Forces ask questions to the founders… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Design Philosophy, Superintelligence, Relativism, and Simulation with John Borthwick In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with John Borthwick, about design philosophy, superintelligence, relativism, and simulation. John Borthwick is CEO and Co-founder of Betaworks, a startup platform that builds and invests in companies across the social, data-driven media Internet. The Betaworks platform combines three areas of expertise. The first is a studio for building products like Giphy, Dots, bitly, and Tweetdeck. The second is an investment… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address Episode Summary for Public Intellectuals, Thought Leaders, and the Marketplace of Ideas with Daniel Drezner In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with political scientist Daniel W. Drezner about public intellectuals, thought leaders, and the marketplace of ideas. Dr. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Geoffrey West on Computational Biology, Complexity, and a Unified Theory of Sustainability In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with theoretical physicist Geoffrey West about his work studying biological systems, infrastructure, and the socioeconomics of cities. Dr. West’s primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions, and cosmological implications. Geoffrey West currently serves as distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, the global headquarters for… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Economic Man and the Moral Economy In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Samuel Bowles, about economic man and the moral economy, exploring some of the latest insights from the field of behavioral economics. The two also explore how incentives and prices convey information and shape perceptions of value in the economy. Dr. Bowles is a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he heads the Behavioral Sciences Program. His studies on… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Political Economy, Technocracy, and the New Gilded Age In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Robert Johnson, about the political economy, inequality, and the failings of our technocratic institutions. Dr. Johnson serves as President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Global Finance Project for the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in New York. Robert Johnson is an international investor and consultant to investment… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address Andrew Keys of Ethereum focused Consensus Systems speaks with Demetri Kofinas about the latest developments in the Blockchain universe including Bitcoin Cash – where it’s been, what it looks like today, and how it has the potential to shape all of our futures In this Market Forces segment of the Hidden Forces podcast, Demetri Kofinas speaks with one of the foremost authorities on blockchain technology and the Ethereum protocol, Andrew… Listen >>

Episode Summary for the Chinese Financial System and the Hard Landing of the Chinese Economy In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Anne Stevenson-Yang. Anne is the co-founder of J Capital Research, which conducts ground-up, primary research for institutional money managers on stocks, the Chinese economy, and the Chinese financial system. She is also the co-founder of a group of online media businesses called Blue Bamboo Ventures. She also founded and operated the CRM software company, Clarity… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Genetics, Genomics, and Big Data in Medicine In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Dr. Eric Schadt. Eric Schadt is founder and CEO of Sema4, as well as Dean of Precision Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. During the course of his 20-year career, Dr. Eric Schadt has built genetics and systems biology groups at Merck. He built the computational biology group at Rosetta. He has served as co-founder… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Human Experience, Phenomenology, and Design: In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Christian Madsbjerg. Christian Madsbjerg is the founder of ReD Associates, a consultancy group focused on helping companies bridge the qualitative divide between themselves, their products, and their customers. The anthropologists, sociologists, economists, journalists, and designers who make up ReD employ the methods of social science to study human behavior. Instead of minimizing complexity, they embrace the non-linearities illuminated through human experience, helping… Listen >>

Dear Friends, It has been three months since I launched the Hidden Forces Podcast. The show has made it onto the Top Podcast Charts on iTunes out of hundreds of thousands of competing shows. It has grown steadily since, and we continue to gain awareness. I’ve often compared the launch of a show like this to the Gemini and early Apollo missions. The first step is in achieving escape velocity and viability in orbit. We have done this. The second step is… Listen >>

Episode Summary for James Grant on Interest Rates and our Financial Future: In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with James Grant. James Grant is a legend of the financial newsletter industry. Once the editor of the yield column in Barron’s, he would leave in 1983 to found Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, two years after the sacred risk-free rate touched just under 20%. This is a level that seems nearly impossible to fathom in today’s world of… Listen >>

Episode Summary for the Next Financial Crisis: In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with economist Steve Keen. Steve is Professor of Economics at Kingston University in London and one of a handful of economists to correctly anticipate the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Professor Keen is also the popular author of “Debunking Economics,” as well as the timely book, “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?” In this episode, we tear up the textbook of contemporary economics…. Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address Philosophical Mathematics, Logic, and the Limits of Formal Systems In Episode 11 of the Hidden Forces podcast, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Ray Monk. Ray Monk is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton in the UK, where he lectures on logic, philosophical mathematics and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. He is presently a visiting Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. A prolific biographer, professor Monk has written books on the philosophers… Listen >>

Episode on Diplomacy, War, and Anarchy In Episode 10 of the Hidden Forces podcast, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Carne Ross. Carne is the founder of Independent Diplomat, which advises dozens of democratic countries and political groups on using diplomacy to achieve their foreign policy goals. In his former capacity as a British diplomat, Carne worked on the Middle East, the global environment, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. He served in British embassies within Germany, Norway, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Federal Reserve In Episode 9 of the Hidden Forces Podcast, Demetri Kofinas explores the history of the Federal Reserve under the chairmanship of Alan Greenspan. His guest for the hour is Sebastian Mallaby. Sebastian is a writer, commentator, and chronicler of financial and economic history. He is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a contributing columnist for the Washington Post. His interests cover a wide variety… Listen >>

Episode Summary on Cybersecurity In Episode 8 of the Hidden Forces podcast, Demetri Kofinas speak with cybersecurity expert and cyber safety advocate, Josh Corman. Josh is the founder of I am The Cavalry, an advocacy group actively engaged in addressing some of the most pressing issues of public safety and threats to human life on the Internet today. He is also the Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. Josh Corman is part of the 2016 Cybersecurity… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address Episode Summary for Complexity Theory In Episode 7 of the Hidden Forces podcast, Demetri Kofinas speaks with one of the pioneers in complexity theory and complexity science, W. Brian Arthur. Brian Arthur has long been associated with the Santa Fe Institute, having served on its board of trustees and its board of science. He has been described by Fortune Magazine, as “one of the country’s leading economic thinkers,” and he is… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Space Warfare In Episode 6 of the Hidden Forces podcast, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Joan Johnson-Freese. Joan Freese is a professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College. She’s been a faculty member at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies and the Air War College, which emphasizes the employment of air, space, and cyberspace in joint operations. Professor Freese has also served on the Space Studies Board of the National Academies of Science and has… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Financial Volatility: In Episode 5 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Christopher Cole. Chris is the founder of Artemis Capital and the portfolio manager of the Artemis Vega Fund, which seeks to profit from periods of financial volatility, dislocation, and systemic crisis in financial markets. His core focus is systematic, quantitative, and behavioral based trading of financial volatility derivatives. In this episode, Demetri and Chris explore political and financial volatility. They discuss the unprecedented level of… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Television Culture and History: In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with famed historian of television culture, Gary Edgerton. Professor Edgerton is Dean of the College of Communication at Butler University. He has published eleven books and more than eighty book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries on a wide assortment of media and television culture topics. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Popular Film and Television. His award-winning book, The Columbia History… Listen >>

Episode Summary for Postmodernism: In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with philosopher and theologian Mark C. Taylor. Mark is Chair of the Department of Religion and Co-Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. A leading figure in debates about postmodernism, Taylor has written on topics ranging from philosophy, religion, literature, art and architecture to education, media, science, technology and economics. He has authored 30 books, among which include Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and… Listen >>

Join Our Mailing List Full Name Email Address Episode Summary for James Rickards: In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with New York Times bestselling author and brilliant financial commentator, James Rickards. James is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers including The Death of Money, Currency Wars, and The New Case For Gold. His latest book is The Road To Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis. He is… Listen >>

Episode Summary for David Kirkpatrick: In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas talks with journalist and technology commentator David Kirkpatrick. David is the author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, and the founder of Techonomy Media, which produces some of the best conferences at the intersection of technology, business, academia, and government. He writes at Techonomy.com, he’s a contributing editor to Bloomberg Television, and is a member of the Council… Listen >>